


Only the Moon Howls

by gremlins-came-and-got-me (Scared_Beings_in_the_Dark)



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Almost Everyone is a Supernatural, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Argents are Hunters, Asexual Derek, Asexual Pre-Sterek, Asexual Stiles, Background Berica - Freeform, Background Corydia, Horror Ending, Hunters are Evil, M/M, Major character death - Freeform, Omega Derek (werewolf classification)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-23
Updated: 2017-11-23
Packaged: 2019-01-31 19:04:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,896
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12688341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scared_Beings_in_the_Dark/pseuds/gremlins-came-and-got-me
Summary: Derek begs Cora to get him hired at the Supernatural Crisis Center where she works as a field agent. It was a better option than the coffee shop by his apartment. However, innocents are being killed by a supernatural creature and it’s up to the SCC to solve the case, but when they close in on the culprit, the team is attacked.





	Only the Moon Howls

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Starshaker](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Starshaker/gifts).



> Beta read by the ever-fantastic and encouraging [Red](https://imyoursourwolf.tumblr.com/)!
> 
> Any remaining mistakes are my own.
> 
> Title is taken from George Carlin's quote: “There are nights when the wolves are silent and only the moon howls.”

\--

The desk was sticky. Derek grimaced as he touched it, rubbing his fingers together in a way that did nothing to dislodge the gunk he felt clinging to his skin.

The lights were dim, which wasn’t a problem for him since he was a werewolf, but other supernatural creatures didn’t have as great of eyesight. In fact, some were downright blind, especially in low level light.

This place was horrible. Why did he beg Cora to help him find a job?

He could have done so much better! He could be working at the coffee shop just down the street from his apartment. Except, no. Derek did not enjoy being around rude people who only wanted to consume overly complicated drinks and look down their noses at the workers (to be fair, not every customer was like that, just a majority of the ones he observed going into this particular shop).

Instead, he’d decided that helping with supernatural crises was more up his alley.

Well, here he was, unidentified crap on his hand already and more than a few unpleasant stares, mostly from the transparent girl snapping her gum at the receptionist’s desk and the almost-lizard looking man to the right.

Derek ignored them both. He’d passed his interview. He deserved to work here.

Suddenly, another man popped up over the partition that blocked Derek’s desk from the one directly across from it. “Wow,” he said, disappearing just as quickly.

Derek wrinkled his nose at the sharp smell of sulfur. A demon, he would guess.

“Hi!” the man shouted, and Derek did not recoil at the sudden reappearance of the man by his elbow. He did, however, react to the increased odor of sulfur. Definitely a demon.

Derek couldn’t help but notice the bulky, bright blue cast on his left leg. None of his business, he thought.

Up close, the man’s burnt almond eyes looked darker and the stink of sulfur became stronger the closer he leaned.

“Hi,” he said again, slapping a hand onto Derek’s chest. It looked as if he didn’t quite have full control over his appendages. His eyes snapped appreciatively up and down Derek’s body, and despite wearing a full three layers, Derek still crossed his arms and tried to shrink down.

He should have known he’d be objectified wherever he went. He knew his standard clipped response of “I’m asexual” probably wouldn’t help. It hadn’t at his last three jobs.

“So, I’m the unofficial greeter for this dump.” The man stuck out his hand. “I’m Stiles, resident demon.”

“Derek,” Derek said, gingerly shaking the hand, aware that his palm was still sticky from his “new” desk. “Werewolf.”

“Ah, so that’s what that smell is.”

“Smell?” Derek frowned. “You’re the one who smells.”

“Rude.”

“What does a werewolf smell like to a demon?”

“Like a wet dog,” Stiles said and bounced away as best as he could with crutches, leaving Derek standing there, feeling not unlike a typhoon has just missed him.

He shrugged it off. He just had to set up his desk and plug in his phone and then he could clean his desk.

The lizard-man next to him leaned over. “Don’t get your hopes up,” he hissed in an entirely too human-y tone for the way his eyelids blinked sideways over his yellowing eyes. “Stiles isn’t into people like you.”

He rolled away before Derek could ask him what he meant, and after a long moment of introspection, Derek decided it didn’t matter. If Stiles “wasn’t into people” like him, like werewolves (he had no compunctions that they all knew where he fell on the sexual spectrum), then all the better for him.

\--

The next time Derek saw anyone was when he got up for his scheduled fifteen minute break and headed outside to get a semi-fresh breath of semi-clean air.

He ran into the demon again. Of course.

Stiles was sitting on the low wall above the outdoor parking lot, a pack of cigarettes in hand. He was currently disassembling one, stacking the freed tobacco into a loose pile while he discarded the wrapper and filter into a miniature trash can he had sitting by his elbow. Derek thought he recognized it from the receptionist’s desk.

“So, I’m sorry,” Stiles said out of the side of his mouth when Derek went to walk by him.

“Pardon?”

Stiles aggressively tore open another cigarette, prying the edge up with his thumbnail. “For inside, for Jackson. I heard him. You weren’t rude. I was. I mean, you’re here all of five minutes and someone already looks at you like fresh meat.”

Derek shrugged. “I’m used to it.” It was the truth. Nowhere Derek went was he free from people ogling him. “It’s really okay. Besides, Jackson? Said you weren’t into people like me.”

Stiles waved a hand beside his head, seemingly forgetting that he still was holding the opened cigarette and showering himself with flakes of tobacco. He grimaced, wiping at it. “Still, you shouldn’t have to be used to it.” He paused, eyes seeking out Derek’s to hold his gaze. “I didn’t mean to objectify you. I just. I wanted someone to help me.” He gestured to his cast. “I’m not allowed to go out in the field but I still have to work. I’m not used to the office job. I thought I could shadow you while you trained. Learn the shit I’m already supposed to know.”

“Oh,” Derek said simply. No one wanted him to help. They all wanted to fuck him, no matter that he didn’t or couldn’t reciprocate. And when they weren’t calling him “stupidly hot,” they were running in terror from his resting bitch face. “I could do that,” he offered. “The training thing. That’d be cool. And I’m sorry for saying you stink.”

“Hey, I said it first.” Stiles straightened and carefully climbed off the wall. He tucked away the pack of cigarettes, scooping the innards into the bin and putting that in his pocket too. “Well, I ought to get this back to Boyd before he goes bonkers looking for it. You know, he’s told me a million times not to touch his stuff. Walk with me?”

Derek shrugged. His break was almost over anyway. And he decided he liked the company. Stiles had already taken a step no one else had in his life: apologized for making him uncomfortable in a situation. This could be the start of an actual friendship.

\--

The first few weeks passed uneventfully—aside from a streak of murders of mostly college kids and the elderly who lived around the campus.

Each body had been drained of blood.

The lead field investigator, a banshee with impeccable style and a commanding presence, always gathered the help desk people (i.e. Derek, Stiles, Lizard-man Jackson, Mostly-Invisible-woman Erica, and taciturn receptionist Boyd) and told them to research things.

Stiles was the only one who could sass her, and he usually did it in the form of waving pages and pages of supernatural creatures all over the place. None that matched the particular style of this killer.

“Wait,” Derek said, after Lydia had dismissed the idea of an impundulu killing these people. “Do you have access to the bodies?” At everyone’s cautious looks, he ducked his head, glaring down at his feet.

Lydia looked pensive for a moment before she schooled her features back into her usual aloof mask. “Why, Derek, would we need access to the bodies? Our job isn’t to figure out who killed them. It’s to stop whatever is doing it.”

“Werewolf,” Derek pointed out, to which Boyd said, “Me too.”

“I mean,” Derek continued, “I can smell things—people. I could figure out who is doing the killing and then we could find them and stop them.”

“That’s gotta be our plan of attack,” Stiles said, snapping his fingers at Lydia, who looked none too pleased with the action.

“In and out,” she said, leaning closer to Derek. “I’ve got a contact on the inside. He’ll get you three minutes. Long enough?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “It’ll have to be. Dismissed.”

As the rest of the office headed back to their desks, Lydia grabbed Derek’s arm, pinning him with a severe look. “I’ll contact you when I need you. Until then, keep your head down, and for Heaven’s sake, don’t meet with the Uppers.”

She walked away before he could ask who the “Uppers” were. Annoying.

Derek sighed and settled back at his desk, and then he noticed that he had a message on his answering machine.

A phone number and the words, “Call me immediately.”

Derek didn’t recognize the voice, and in the company directory, the number was listed as belonging to Humane Resources, which was a suspicious name for a department in a supernatural crisis center.

He checked his watch. Noon. Lunchtime. Immediately could wait until after he hunted down Cora and at least shared some pack time this week.

\--

Of course, Cora hated the sandwich Derek brought her. He wasn’t sure why he was surprised. Wearing Dijon mustard and pickles was not something appetizing, much less for a werewolf who had placed top marks in scent tracking at the Academy for the Supernaturally Inclined.

 Derek grimaced down at the stains, wondering if he could slip down to the little boutique just half a block away and buy a new shirt. Hardly anyone would miss him—he’d already finished his assignment and was just waiting for Lydia to come back. His phone rang, interrupting his plotting.

“Supernatural Crisis Center, this is Derek.”

“Hello, Derek,” the same voice from the message said. “It’s Allison…from HR? I was wondering if I could meet with you this afternoon?”

“Whatever Cora did, I’m not responsible for her actions.”

“Oh, it’s nothing Cora did,” Allison said brightly. “I want to speak to you regarding your status as an omega werewolf.”

Derek paused, angry. HR had no right to do that to him. “My status as an omega werewolf was changed,” he gritted out through clenched teeth. “If you check my card, you’ll see that I am a branch member of the McCall pack—” only because Derek’s family had been murdered by a rogue hunter and Scott had somehow inherited the territory while Derek was recuperating—“and that my sister is a full member of the McCall pack.”

Allison murmured sympathetically. “I can see that the paperwork was started on enfolding you into the McCall pack; however, it was never completed. You are, without a doubt, still an omega werewolf, and as such, you are required to meet with HR within six weeks of your hire date.”

“Do the demons, banshees, and ghosts have to meet with you too?” Derek demanded.

“Excuse me?”

“Demons, banshees, and ghosts,” Derek repeated. “Do they have to meet with you within six weeks of their hiring date or is it just werewolves?”

“Just omega werewolves,” Allison said coldly, the change in her demeanor immediate. “You have thirty minutes to arrive at my office or you’re fired.”

Derek slammed the phone down but Allison had already hung up.

He used every last one of those thirty minutes to go get a new shirt, write a complaint about having to meet with HR when nowhere in the policies was it stated that he had to, and climbing the stairs instead of taking the elevator.

Allison’s receptionist, a human female with long nails tipped with wolfsbane, greeted him and waved him to a chair.

“Allison will be right with you,” she almost purred, her gaze following the lines of Derek’s body in a most uncomfortable fashion. Derek glared at her, pointedly moving to a chair that was out of her line of sight.

“Derek Hale,” Allison called a minute later, and Derek shuffled back into view. Allison was pretty in a cruel kind of way, her fair features highlighted severely while her hair was pulled into a messy bun, lips painted blood red. Her nails too were dipped in wolfsbane.

Derek followed her back into her office and opted to remain standing while she settled behind her large metal desk. The surface was cluttered with hunter paraphernalia including a pair of ring daggers and a modified humidifier.

If he breathed in too deeply, the edge of wolfsbane, a few different strains stored in the top drawer by Allison’s right hand, burned the inside of his nostrils. He sneezed several times in quick succession, stifling them as best he could in his elbow. Allison wrinkled her nose at him, using a single finger to push a box of tissues toward him. Derek politely refused, not the least of which was because there was mistletoe inside the box and the toxic properties had no doubt had time to transfer to the tissues.

Allison was digging her own grave with this shit.

“So,” she said, flipping open a folder, his picture pinned to the front with a paperclip. “Let’s talk about your omega status.”

“Yes, let’s.” He pulled out his report and a copy of the company’s handbook. “Here, in section fifteen-point-two, there is a detailed list of unacceptable discrimination, one of which is creating a hostile work environment based on one’s supernatural classification.” He pointed at the tissues. “Mistletoe.” The ring daggers. “Weaponry designed specifically for hunting supernatural creatures.” The humidifier. “I can smell traces of wolfsbane in there. And in your desk. Both you and your receptionist have wolfsbane in your nail polish. If that isn’t a hostile work environment, then I shudder to find what you think is truly appalling.”

“You are a werewolf,” Allison said, one eyebrow raised. Her hands twitched, and Derek wondered if she was going to try for the ring daggers or if she had something closer. “You are inherently a weapon. Does that not make you a hostile work environment by definition?”

“Oh, you mean these?” Derek flicked his claws up, fighting back a smile at Allison’s sharp inhale. He put them away, unsurprised to find himself facing down a gun. “Unlike you, I have control.” He dropped his report on the desk, added the violations he had encountered in her office, and left her staring at it.

He didn’t breathe until he was back in his cubicle. He sank into his chair and put his head down to his knees.

“Hey,” Stiles said, over the partition. “What’s wrong? What happened? Where did you go?”

“There you are,” Lydia said. Derek straightened, forcing his face into a blank mask. “Why weren’t you here five minutes ago?”

“Because I had a meeting with the HR department.” He stood up, gathering his mug, cup of pens, and a random ruler Stiles had given him from Boyd’s desk.

“Where are you going now?” Lydia demanded.

Derek shrugged. “Away. I’m probably fired. I think I am.”

“Why would you be fired?” Stiles asked.

“I told you not to meet with the Uppers,” Lydia said.

“You never even told me who the Uppers were.”

“Oh shit, you met with Allison? She’s so weird, right?” Stiles scrambled off his desk and crutched his way into Derek’s cubicle. The whole office was listening in. Even Jackson had abandoned his monitor to not so subtly cock an ear toward them. “What’d you think of her collection?”

“Collection of what?” Lydia asked.

“Wolfsbane,” Derek guessed. Stiles nodded. “She also had mistletoe in the tissues.”

“Goddamn it.” Lydia frowned. “I’ve told her not to pull that shit. Let me guess, she found out that your paperwork hadn’t been properly filed and your status is still listed as omega. Did you fill out a report?”

Derek nodded. He opened the bottom left drawer, under a stack of unfilled requisition forms, he pulled out his duplicate report, adding the recent violations and dating them. He showed it to Lydia, and she nodded in approval.

“You’re not fired. If anything, Allison might get a reprimand. I doubt it, but we can always hope. Now, come with me. My contact at the morgue is ready for us.”

Stiles flashed him a pair of thumbs up and then went back to his cubicle, detouring just to smack the back of Jackson’s head.

“What?” Jackson snapped. “I’m not doing anything.”

“Exactly,” Stiles said.

Lydia stared at Derek unimpressed while he shoved everything into his bag and slung it over his shoulder.

“I’m not taking any chances,” he told her as they took the elevator down. “If I’m not fired, I can put my stuff back later. If I am fired, then I don’t have to clean my desk while someone watches me.”

“You’re not fired.” Lydia sounded and smelled exasperated.

“If you say so.”

She snorted quietly and then fixed Derek with a severe glare. He held his hands up.

“Get in.” She pointed at a tiny Volkswagen.

Derek got in.

\--

“Hi, I’m Scott McCall.” Derek shook his sister’s alpha’s hand. “Bet you’re surprised to see me here, huh?”

Derek shrugged. “Not really. Cora mentioned you worked with bodies. There’s not a lot of places in Beacon Hills to work with bodies.”

“Derek thinks that he can track whatever’s killing those humans if he gets the scent of the killer.”

Scott whistled. “That would be impressive, even for a werewolf.”

Derek didn’t respond.

Lydia seemed annoyed, tapping her foot and crossing her arms. Finally, after a few minutes of staring at each other, she huffed.

“Scott.”

“Yes, Lydia?”

“Do you have any idea why Derek’s paperwork on informally joining your pack has been mislaid?”

“It’s been what?”

Derek left them to iron it out. If he needed to file the paperwork again, he could. He wouldn’t let Allison and her prejudice run him off the job. Not while innocents were being killed anyway. Carefully, he followed his nose to a more recent addition to Scott’s workload.

An elderly woman with a disturbed expression.

She was unnaturally pale, wrinkles smoothed away, lips and eyelids blue. If Derek had to wager a guess, he’d go for drained of blood. He discreetly leaned close, sniffing at the juncture of her shoulder and neck and nearly recoiled at the stench of _wrongness_ stuck there.

There were monsters like Derek, able to shift into something deadly but rarely if ever violent. And then there were monsters like whatever had done this.

The woman had been ill, probably for a long time, with some kind of cancer. It was likely that whatever had killed her had also been affected.

He checked the date on her drawer. She’d been discovered three days ago. She had been dead for nearly six days now.

The last known victim of this killer had been found the day before her but had only been dead for hours when he was pulled out of a lake by campus security officers.

His drawer was next to this woman’s. Derek pulled him out, sniffing. Yep. There was that same ugly scent clinging to his skin.

None of the other victims were still here, so Derek returned to Lydia and Scott.

“I’m sorry,” Scott was saying. “I’ll check into it. I _know_ I gave the forms to the registrar’s office.” He turned to Derek. “I’m going to fix this for you. I promise.”

“Do you need me to do anything?”

Scott shook his head. “No, you should be good.”

“Good. I’m leaving.” The smells of the morgue—dead bodies and what they died from—was getting to him. He didn’t understand how Scott could stand it here with his werewolf nose.

“See that you fix it today, Scott,” Lydia said, threateningly before following Derek back to her little car.

“I think I know what happened,” she said once they were back in the center’s parking lot. “Allison’s aunt, Kate Argent works at the registrar’s office. She is in charge of placing relocating supernatural creatures into packs. I don’t know why she would have messed with your application, but I intend to have words with both her and Allison over this.”

Derek bit back the normal response of “It’s okay,” because it most definitely was not okay. Allison had pulled a gun on him when he was in complete control of his shift. Instead, he said, “Thank you,” and climbed out of the vehicle to go back to work.

Lydia was still sitting in her car when he glanced out the window an hour later.

\--

Scott was waiting for Derek when he got home that night. In his hand, he held a piece of paper.

“Congrats,” he said, embracing Derek and rubbing his nose against the hollow of Derek’s throat. He shoved the paper at Derek when he pulled back.

Derek stared at it, uncomprehending.

“You’re officially a member of my pack!” Scott cheered. “Well, not fully. You’re still only a branch pack member but it should be enough to get HR off your case.”

Gingerly, with a growing sense of foreboding, Derek took the page. It was signed by Katherine Argent but the scent clinging to it was not human.

Derek offered it back to Scott. “Can you smell that?”

Scott shook his head, tapping the side of his nose. “I work in a morgue. Do you think I have a great sense of smell?”

“No, I guess not.”

“Anyway, what does it smell like?”

Derek wrinkled his nose in disgust. He didn’t want to sniff it again. “Like death,” he said. “Like, something wrong touched it. Isn’t Kate Argent a hunter?”

“Yeah.”

“Does she smell human?”

“Dude, I don’t know. Why don’t you go smell her yourself?”

“That’s…not a bad idea.” Derek had tomorrow scheduled off. He could go down to the registrar’s office and sniff out Kate, and if she smelled as terrible as the scent on the paper did, then he could report her. To whom, he did not know, but there had to be someone higher up on the chain of command than her. “Thanks, Scott.”

He shut the door in Scott’s face and immediately buried the certificate in a shoebox where he stored important papers he might need in the near future before he moved them to a safe box under his bed.

Then, he washed his hands thoroughly, trying to rub off the stink.

When he went to bed three hours later, he could still smell it.

\--

Kate Argent wasn’t in when Derek stopped by the Registrar’s Office for Supernatural Creatures. The man at the desk was short and squat with greasy hair and a sickly complexion. He smelled of nothing, which was not surprising. Many non-humans that chose to work with hunters would wear scent blockers to keep other supernatural creatures from outing them. If Kate was nearly as vigilant as Allison, then it was no wonder that this man did not want his true scent revealed.

“Sorry,” Derek mumbled, “I forgot my paperwork.” He walked out, ignoring the heavy glare that the man leveled at him. At the doorway, he thought he caught the horrible stench from his certificate, and when he looked back, the man was still staring at him.

Unnerved, Derek continued out. He needed to research creatures that smelled like death.

He headed into the office.

\--

“Hey,” Stiles said, perched on the edge of Derek’s desk, playing with a little lacrosse stick pen he claimed had been gifted to him by the poltergeist in the basement.

Derek raised an eyebrow at the outright falsehood and continued typing slowly, picking at the keys because he knew it annoyed Stiles.

“Oh my God,” Stiles groaned a few seconds later. “Seriously? Move. Move your ass. Just—get.” He shoved Derek’s chair aside and began tapping at the keys while Derek kept rolling right over to Jackson’s desk where he could snatch Jackson’s overly large and definitely not standard stapler, ignoring Jackson’s indignant “Hey!”

Then he wheeled his chair back and stapled Stiles’ tie to his desk.

“Real mature, ass-butt,” Stiles griped. He didn’t stop typing though so Derek went to get him a cup of coffee from the prime pot Boyd brewed for Erica, even though she was a ghost and couldn’t even smell it.

“Don’t you dare, Hale!” Erica said, but since she was a ghost, she only ended up passing through him while he filled a mug with coffee and a lot of sugar. “That’s mine!”

“Everything is yours,” Derek remarked mildly. He’d once come in early to find Erica and Boyd had “commandeered” his desk for purposes he’d rather not think about. He had a sneaking suspicion that the gunk he’d touched on his first day was some kind of ectoplasm-werewolf spunk mix. He had scrubbed his desk with industrial strength cleaners after that.

“Thanks,” Stiles grunted when Derek set the mug by his elbow.

Apparently, Stiles had forgotten that Derek stapled him to the desk because when he grabbed the mug to drink it, his tie stretched taut and Stiles was unable to fit the mug under his mouth.

“Hardy-har.” He tore the tie free and then swallowed half the hot coffee in one go. Being a demon had its advantages. Derek gently hip-checked him away from the computer before finishing the typing faster than Stiles had been typing. Stiles snorted, sipping at the coffee.

“Mine!” someone yelled. Stiles spluttered coffee everywhere and Derek, startled, added a few extra letters to his report.

The thing, a man with wild hair and wilder eyes slapped a hand onto the lacrosse pen. “I swear to my dead grandmother’s rotting corpse, Biliniski, if you ever put your grubby paws on any of my possessions again, I’ll make you run laps around this building.”

“Do you want me to say hi to your grandmother again?” Stiles said, and the man sank down through the floor without responding. “I think he hates me a little more each time I remind him where his grandmother ended up,” Stiles said. He picked up Jackson’s stapler and fiddled with it.

He was silent while Derek finished his report, and it wasn’t until Derek was in the middle of texting Cora to see if she still wanted to meet up for supper at that new bistro that had opened down the street from his apartment (she didn’t) that Stiles put his hand on Derek’s arm.

Derek looked at his hand, at his face, and back at his hand. Stiles moved it to the back of his head, scratching at it. “So, um, this might seem out of place, but do you want to maybe go see a movie. With me. Tonight?”

Derek glanced down at his phone, at Cora’s emphatic “NO!!” and said, “Sure.”

“Really?” Stiles eyed him suspiciously.

“Really,” Derek said drily. “It’ll be fun.”

Stiles smiled at that. “Yes. Yes it will. Meet you downstairs?”

Derek nodded and Stiles scurried away as fast as his crutches let him.

Jackson slammed a scaled hand onto the desk next to Derek’s hand. “Don’t fuck this up,” he growled, snatching his stapler and marching back to his desk.

“What’s there to fuck up?” Derek asked no one in particular.

\--

Stiles leaned in, and Derek sighed internally. Of course. They’d just spent a couple of hours at the movies. This was the expected outcome. He braced himself for Stiles’ lips and wasn’t disappointed when Stiles cut the kiss short.

“So,” Stiles said, shuffling on his good foot, awkwardly scrubbing a hand through his hair. “So, um, that was. That was—”

“Horrible,” Derek filled in.

Stiles blinked at him.

“Really,” Derek continued, unperturbed. “I’m a shitty kisser. Go on, say it. You won’t hurt my feelings.”

“Um,” Stiles said. “I’m kind of a bad kisser too.”

Derek paused, wondering if Stiles was saying what he thought he was saying.

“I’m not…I mean, I don’t. Oh hell. You didn’t even want to be kissed anyway.”

“True. Did you not want to be kissed?”

“No, not really.”

“Cool.”

“Wait, really? Like, we can hang out again without the kissing?”

“Absolutely.” Derek grinned. “I like _you_ , Stiles, not your kisses. I’m not a romance kind of person.”

“Oh thank God,” Stiles breathed. “Neither am I, in case that wasn’t clear. So, uh, yeah, I’d like to see you again, in a non-kissing way that is maybe more than friends but not friends like that.”

“I’d like that,” Derek told him honestly. “Next Friday?”

“Perfect.”

Their phones chirped at the same time.

“Work,” Stiles said. “Give you a ride?”

“Yeah,” Derek agreed.

\--

“So, another one drained,” Lydia was saying by the time Derek and Stiles made it back to the office. “Nice of you to join us,” she said drily.

Stiles stuck his tongue out at her. “You love us anyway.”

“God knows why.” She continued her report while Stiles crutched to the nearest chair.

Great. Another innocent killed, fingers pointed very firmly at the elusive killer. Derek rolled his shoulders to help with the growing tension headache he could feel pounding behind his eyes.

Stiles shot him a knowing look, and Derek glared down at his feet.

Death had always come hard to Derek, ever since he’d discovered his Nana dead when he was four. These killings were wearing him very thin, and, if he scented the room just right, he wasn’t the only one.

Lydia seemed exhausted, purple bruises shining through her concealer. Her clothes were no more rumpled than usual, but she was brusque where she’d been warm, her voice hinting at the scream still trapped in her lungs.

No doubt then, she had been the one to discover the body. It was bound to happen sooner or later.

“Derek?” Stiles asked, breaking his concentration. “Would you mind?” He pointed to the lone shoe on the desk next to Lydia’s elbow.

“It’s fresh,” Lydia said, an apology to be sure.

Derek forced his feet to move, to carry him to the discarded item. A young woman’s running shoe, well used from the worn grooves on the sole, the dingy laces, and the permeated sweat.

He didn’t touch it. The first inhale brought nothing new except an unsettling shiver of fear. The woman had died terrified, which meant she’d likely seen what it was that killed her.

He sniffed again, parsing through the smells until he struck one that was familiar and yet not. It was that same wrongness that clung to the other victims.

This particular essence of it felt too close to him. He should know it, but it was elusive. He turned to Lydia.

She nodded. “I noticed it too.” She cleared her throat. “Would everyone please step into the conference room? I’m going to call in our field investigators. We’ll get to the bottom of this before long.”

Lydia ducked away to make her calls, and the rest of the office moved toward the conference room. Stiles sidled up to Derek, nudging him with one of his crutches. “What’s going on, big guy? What’d you smell?”

Derek leaned into Stiles’ side, inhaling the soothing stink of his sulfur emissions. “I’ll tell you later, when Lydia comes back.”

Stiles agreed easily and crutched off to talk to some of the archive staff.

Derek settled in by the window, staring down at the parking lot. He was sorting through all the scents he’d ever smelled in his life, trying to match the stench of the killer to his coworkers.

There were three recent hires, fresh faced temps huddling together like they were afraid the rest of the office might eat them. Well, some of them could. Isaac from Accounting was a reformed wendigo who liked staring a little too long at people’s hands when they talked to him.

Someone new to the area would have to go to the registrar’s office, which could explain how the scent ended up there.

But, Derek thought, the murders had been going on for at least a couple months. Could a supernatural creature attack humans without being detected for that long?

Lydia threw open the door, leading the field investigators. She made everyone, including Derek, line up against the wall while she passed out gauze pads.

“Press these against your pulse points,” she instructed, demonstrating with herself. Then, she sealed her pad in a bag and labeled it with her name and the date. She went through the line, marking everyone’s bags and setting them on the table.

“Wait a minute,” Stiles called when Lydia was finished. “Where’s Finstock?”

Derek looked around at the gathered faces. Cora glared from where she was leaning against the wall between Boyd and Erica. Jackson had a forced look of boredom on his face while Danny from IT talked at him. All the people he knew now. He couldn’t tell if anyone was missing.

“Who’s Finstock?” he asked.

Stiles sputtered for a moment before pulling out the little lacrosse pen from the poltergeist. “Finstock, crazy guy, always travels through floors instead of using the elevator like a well-adjusted spirit? Talks about his grandmother and her corpse more than is polite? That’s Finstock.”

“The poltergeist.”

“Yeah, sure, the poltergeist. Anyway, he’s not here.”

“Lydia?”

Lydia glared at the samples. “Derek, stay here and start sniffing. Cora, Stiles, Erica, and Boyd, you’re with me. Everyone else, back to work.”

It did not take long to go through the samples even though there were maybe sixty of them. It also did not escape Derek’s notice that none of the Uppers, the HR department, had submitted samples. Considering Allison and her secretary both worked with wolfsbane with no effect, Derek surmised it was safe to assume that the Uppers were all human or hunters.

Not a single sample smelled remotely like the killer’s. Derek even sniffed his and Lydia’s to be sure.

Nope. No death smell.

Even Isaac had a semi-pleasant odor to him.

Derek pulled out his phone to tell Lydia about it when Stiles called him.

“Get down here now!” Stiles ordered. “And bring Jackson. He’s a tracker even though he likes being a desk jockey more.”

Derek could hear the desperation in Stiles’ voice, and it made him hurry to Jackson’s desk.

“What do you want? Do you need to be told to back off Stiles again?” Jackson didn’t bother looking up from his screen.

“Stiles told me to bring you to the basement. Apparently, you’re a tracker.”

Jackson turned finally, his eyes golden, pupils nothing more than slits. “What are we waiting for?”

He jumped up, tail whipping past Derek to knock over a stack of files. The stairs would be quickest, Derek thought, following Jackson as he bounded down the hall, leaping over their startled coworkers.

The moment he stepped into the unlit basement, Derek shivered. This felt like a trap. He slapped at a light switch and nothing happened.

Beside him, Jackson growled, low and throaty. A warning.

Something creaked, and Derek searched the darkness. Where were Lydia and Stiles? Erica and Boyd? Another creak. Leather.

“Cover your eyes!” he hissed at Jackson, barely getting a hand over his own before the room exploded into violent light.

Flash grenades, accompanied by loud bangs and purple smoke rising from the shrapnel.

Derek unleashed his claws and teeth, jumping forward, making himself a target. He was rewarded with a crossbow bolt to his shoulder. He returned the favor by sinking his teeth into the hunter’s arm. A sick sense of pride settled in his stomach when Allison screamed as his teeth closed on her wrist.

He left her cradling her mostly detached right hand and turned back to the room. Jackson was on his knees, fully shifted into his kanima form, sniffing the air around what looked like a pile of burned bones.

The wolfsbane from the flash grenades warped Derek’s senses, and he wasn’t sure if that same smell of death clung to the bones or not.

When he stepped forward to help investigate, he felt a sharp pain slice into his back, stabbing deep between his shoulders.

A quick swipe with his claws dispatched the hunter on his back. Kate.

He’d been lucky and caught her throat. She gurgled, staring up at nothing, the hand not on her throat twitching by her side.

The lights flickered back on, revealing Lydia in the corner, hands wrapped around her mouth, no doubt keeping a scream in. Cora sat slumped against the wall next to her. Her stomach had been sliced open, her bowels spilled over her lap. She was breathing shallowly, and Derek made a move to go to her. He was stopped by Stiles, limping heavily his crutches missing. Above the pile of definitely bones, Erica’s ghostly body swung as if buffeted by a breeze. By the steps, Boyd lay, severed in half.

For as many of his coworkers and family and friends were dead or injured, there were more bodies of hunters. Allison was the only one still alive, whimpering in pain as she tried to wrap her wrist with a field bandage.

“It was a trap,” Stiles said. “The hunters, they killed Finstock.” He moved to Derek’s side, pressing a hand against his back where the cut from Kate’s knife was not healing. “They think that we, the SCC workers, killed those people. They were going to kill us in the conference room but Finstock overheard them and was going to warn us.”

“There’s going to be an investigation,” Cora panted, hands slicked with her own blood, cramming her intestines back inside. “There will be other hunters.” She wasn’t healing and neither was Derek, but at least they were alive. Derek glanced at Boyd, at Erica and mourned them, a low howl sliding from his throat as he moved to Boyd to close his eyes.

“Erica wasn’t really dead,” Stiles said. “She was in a coma somewhere. She wandered off and got lost and then she came here. Boyd was saving up so they could find her body.”

Lydia’s scream came then, ringing in their ears, lasting for nearly a full three minutes. When she was done, she fainted. Cora moved to catch her even though it jostled her wound. She sank down, cradling Lydia gently, smearing blood on her face when she tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear.

“Will the investigation be police or hunters?” Derek asked Stiles.

“Probably hunters unless we call the police.”

“Then call the police.” Derek watched Jackson move from Finstock’s bones, heading for the door, tracking who knew what. It didn’t matter right now. Derek turned to Stiles. “We’ll go out on our terms. Not on the hunters’.”

“Agreed.”

\--

When he was finally released from the Sheriff’s Station, Derek stunk like death, like blood and fear, and faint traces of wolfsbane. He smelled like murder.

He dragged his tired body up the three flights of stairs to his apartment, fumbling with his key until the door opened when he leaned on it a little too hard.

He dropped his keys and phone on the shelf between the kitchen and the front hall, grabbed a bottle of witch’s brew from the opened six-pack in his fridge, and shuffled toward the bathroom for a long, hot shower.

As he passed his bedroom door, a sharp inhale drew his attention. He froze, staring at the intruder.

“Hi,” the man from the registrar’s office said.

Derek eyed him. “Why are you in my apartment?” Derek couldn’t identify his scent over all the other smells stuck in his nose.

He held up Derek’s pack certificate. “Just needed to collect this. I realized that I forgot a very important step.”

“Why didn’t you just call me and tell me to bring it down to you?”

Derek studied him closely. He still looked sickly, like he’d eaten something that hadn’t agreed with him. His hair was even greasier and graying at the temples. His eyes were beady, his gaze unwavering. All in all, Derek felt very unsettled.

“Since I’ve gotten this, I’ll just see myself out. Unless, you don’t want me to go?”

His voice was soft and melodic but Derek could hear the power behind it.

Something was wrong.

Derek’s mind spun, screaming about danger, but he couldn’t move his feet.

“Beautiful,” the man said, stepping closer. He trailed his empty hand across Derek’s arm, and his scent finally made it into Derek’s olfactory receptors. This was the killer. His scent matched perfectly.

Derek recoiled, throwing an arm up and howling as the man sank his teeth into his flesh. The bottle of witch’s brew slipped from his numb fingers, shattering and splashing his legs with infused alcohol.

“Oh so delightful!” the man crowed, licking his lips. “You know, fear makes everything taste more delicious.”

Revulsion shivered down Derek’s spine and he swallowed hard, asking, “What are you?” He had an idea though.

“I’m known by many names. Xīxuèguǐ. Vrykólakas. Vampire. But, you can call me Greenberg.”

Derek shook off the influence of Greenberg’s voice and managed to turn around. If he called for Scott, would he hear him? Would Cora, even though she was still healing and focused on tending to Lydia (apparently they were dating and that was why she didn’t like Derek crashing her lunch breaks so much)?

Would they get there in time to help him?

Greenberg materialized in front of him right as his hand closed around his phone.

The last thing Derek felt was Greenberg’s teeth snapping closed over his jugular.

The second to last thing he felt was his fist punching through Greenberg’s chest, through his withered heart.

Derek hoped it was enough.

 

The End

**Author's Note:**

> Impundulu = lightning bird of the vampire family. It is a South African mythological creature that presents as a familiar of female witches and is said to feed on the witches’ enemies.  
> Xīxuèguǐ = Vampire in Chinese (spelled 吸血鬼)  
> Vrykólakas = Vampire in Greek (spelled βρυκόλακας)


End file.
